April 19, 1960: In South Korea, the April 19 movement begins, eventually toppling President Syngman Rhee.
On April 11, 1960, a fisherman discovered the body of a teenager washed up in the harbor of Masan. Kim Chu Yol had been a student at a local high school, and he had been wearing his uniform when he died, and he was wearing it still when he was discovered. Authorities, when pressed, had insisted that Kim had drowned, accidentally and unsuspiciously. There was no reason to suspect that, for example, he had been killed almost a month before his body floated to its unceremonious chance discovery among fish and putrid bay water, that he had been killed in a clash with police, or that, because of those hypothetical circumstances of death, there were fragments of a tear gas shell still lodged in his eyes.
A strong tradition of student protest in South Korea drove masses of students, among them Kim, out to rally against President Syngman Rhee in March 1960. Rhee had tallied up near 90% of the votes in the presidential election that month. In his previous twelve years as the first and thus far only president of the new Republic of Korea, Rhee had crushed dissent in the name of national security. The Republic was new, and so was its unity - a heavy ask, when the two separate Republics had been declared, on little rational basis, in 1948. Internal political strife still racked South Korean politics, “dominated by a rivalry between Rightists and the remnants of the Left Wing People’s Committees,” the latter led by communists.
Contemporary CIA reports described Rhee and his cohort as “essentially demagogues bent on autocratic rule,” but mostly suitable for the purposes of ruling South Korea, since Rhee both favored the West and had not, as had many belonging to the traditional South Korean ruling class and political elite, pandered to the Japanese during Japan’s colonial rule of the peninsula. In fact Rhee had legitimate nationalist credentials - and better yet, was an obstinate anticommunist. CIA reports also noted, however, even under the steady hand, or clenched fist, of such a leader, South Korea was not a unified anticommunist stronghold but one with its own longstanding divisions; it had its own irreducible history and politics, vested class powers and upstart ones: radicals, guerrillas, organizers of the untapped mass power of labor and peasantry. Under national security and anti-subversion laws, South Korea’s major political, military, educational, and cultural institutions were purged of Leftist influences. Such suppression characterized the Rhee regime.
As the country emerged from the Korean War, Rhee obtained a second presidency and then, in 1960, at age 84, pushed through a constitutional amendment obliging him yet a third. Discontent over suspected electoral fraud strew embers of anti-government discontent across the country. In Masan, thousands, including students, had marched and demanded to see Kim Chu Yol’s body and had dredged out the truth. This news spread far beyond the bay. Embers looked to combust into inferno. Students coordinated across Korea’s universities to ready one massive demonstration, set to begin on April 19, 1960. Members of all levels of Korean society were to participate - although anti-communist suppression continued to strangle the growth of even labor unions, and the energy of mass civil protest did not quite rejuvenate an anemic organized Left. Time magazine correspondents were quick to differentiate these “eager, patriotic youngsters” from “communist invaders,” and to characterize this as an outburst, an acting out of a “single, sudden impulse of youth.”
On April 19, 1960, the day after Rhee’s 85th birthday, some 100,000 South Koreans took to the streets. Police and protestors clashed for a week. Hundreds of professors eventually joined the demonstrations. Rhee attributed the uprising to communist subversion, declared martial law, and eventually began to offer concessions as, outside the executive Blue House, government forces killed dozens of demonstrators (ultimately at least 150) over the course of that week. Finally, on April 26, Rhee resigned and fled via American airlift to Honolulu. This time, he was gone for good - but not forgotten. One of Rhee’s legacies was the succeeding constitutional system and its deliberately weak executive office, but this was not to last, either.
“North Korean Perspectives on the Overthrow of Syngman Rhee”
Tim Shorrock: “South Korea’s First Revolution Through the eyes of an American boy in Seoul”
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